We revisit the AMG-chasing XFR-S, the performance Jaguar turned up to 11.
WORK ON car magazines for long enough and it’s inevitable that you will have some weeks where the variety of machinery you find yourself in is somewhat varied to say the least. And so it was while putting this issue of JW together where in the course of a single week I found myself piloting everything from a century-old Austin 7 to an electric car from an as-yet unknown maker which is so new it has yet to appear on sale, while somewhere between these two landmarks sat a hybrid Toyota company car, Honda S2000 and the Jaguar XFR-S you see here.
It wasn’t until afterwards that I realised that this oddball selection of cars neatly encapsulated a century of progress in the automotive world, from straight petrol to the hybrid half-way house and the allelectric future. Naturally for any JW readers – and anyone with even the slightest petrolhead leanings – it’s the Jaguar which stands out as the highlight, its 273bhp per tonne eclipsing even the frantic Honda roadster.
For those unfamiliar with the significance of that single ‘S’, it can loosely be encapsulated as the regular XFR turned up Spinal Tap-stye to 11 and it’s unlikely we’ll see its like again. Which is a great shame, since this single model showed just how great Jaguar can be when it’s on top of its game and when the brief is not only to challenge the established German players but to beat them at their own game.
At a glance it’s easy to be confused by the XFR-S, the low production run, general rarity and the lairy appearance – especially in the French Racing Blue of Rob Crisp’s example in our photographs – suggesting it might be a homologation special, the work perhaps of the kind of after-hours skunk works teams which created some of the greats from automotive history like the original Golf GTI and BMW’s lunatic M Roadster.
But no, the XFR-S is a properly developed and very much fully engineered product which just a single drive will tell you doesn’t need to make any excuses to anyone.
On its introduction back in 2013, Jaguar’s then chief engineer for vehicle integrity, Mike Cross suggested that it represented simply a logical extension of the recipe which created the XFR – sharper, more responsive and yes, more powerful. Oh and louder, too – but not excessively so, since in Cross’s own words at the time, that “wouldn’t have been very Jaguar.”
Quite what does constitute ‘very Jaguar’ is open to debate of course, but the wings and spoilers of the R-S are a long way from the average XF quietly slipping past discreetly in its sober metallic paint. In fact the car’s extrovert appearance hails more from the era of Escort Cosworth and Lotus Carlton – and speaking as a former custodian of the Ford, I’d say that’s something very much to b
